There is just something about the real cool killer, to borrow a phrase from Chester Himes, which piques the interest of so many readers. The unique moral code, the take-charge attitude, the ability to do the things an ordinary person never could or would. As the books of Trevanian, Lawrence Block, Thomas Perry, Loren D. Estleman, Max Allan Collins and, now, Barry Eisler have shown, crime-fiction fans love a good hit man.

John Rain, it just so happens, is among the best. Half-Japanese, half-American, all badass, Rain is among the deadliest men ever to take up arms in a thriller. (Of course, he hardly needs any arms but his own — one of Rain's favorite offensive moves is the neck crank, delivered so swiftly and fatally that his opponent seldom even realizes what is happening before he never realizes anything again.)

At the end of Hard Rain, last year's Gumshoe Award-nominated second book in the series, John Rain was preparing to leave Japan and retire from the assassin business. The way of life he had lived for some 30 years, ever since his days in Vietnam, had taken its toll on him. After costing him so much, and, finally, costing him love, Rain had had enough.

As with Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III, however, just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. Rain's old employers, the Christians in Action (yes, CIA), find him trying to live a quiet life in Brazil, just another Japanese expat enjoying days filled with sun, sand and smooth caipirinhas. The CIA folks have a job and they need his help. Rain is given little choice: the demons, both real and imagined, that still haunt him from his previous life will never let him rest. He is too valuable, too much a part of his old employers' system, for them to ever let him go. For his part, there is no way Rain can afford financially to keep running, nowhere far enough away to hide. He comes to realize that, as with Heifetz or Horowitz, he is the very best at what he does, and there is no way he can really retire.

The assignment the CIA has for him seems simple enough: he is to journey to Macau, the small island off the southeast coast of China, and there kill Achille Belghazi, a French-Arab arms dealer known for supplying several Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian terror groups. Belghazi, it seems, is a degenerate gambler and will be spending time in the famed high-roller casinos of Macau. His expected presence there should make him an easy target for elimination.